On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 08:46:33AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
Yes. It completely marginalizes the remaining positive qualities of the Domain Name System as a way to find things, in the name of giving people "more options."
The Domain Name System is not now, and never has been, away to *find* things, anymore than 123 Elm St, Worcester MA is a way to *find* a house. It's a way to *denote* things, uniquely. You *find* an address by looking in a map directory, and then on the map. You find things on the Internet using a search engine, and the second-order derivatives.
Let me start by saying that I believe that the trends in the DNS have been going the wrong way for well over a decade. The insistence on the part of many that the namespace be flattened is just a poor choice. People are now used to trying "<foo>.com" to reach a company. In some cases, this makes fair sense; I can see why "ibm.com" or "seagate.com" are that way, even though in some cases there are namespace collisions with other trademarks.
"Famous trademarks".
In others, it's ridiculous - why the heck do I get someplace in California when I go to "martyspizza.com", rather than our local very excellent pizza place? (sadly this example is less effective now, they managed to get "martyspizza.net" a few years back).
Sure. Local collisions are inevitable. Blocker Transfer, a local moving company client of mine, wanted to register a domain back in 1997... when the company was 99 years old. blocker.com was taken. They took blocker100.com, and promoted it.
We never had any business allowing small, local businesses to register in .com, or non-networking companies to register in .net, or non-organizations in .org... but a whole generation of Internet "professionals" "knew better" and the end result at the end of the road is that DNS will end up being almost as useless as IPv4 numbers for identifying the more obscure bits of the Internet.
Correct; this is exactly the problem. But a lot of it stems, Joe, from the misconception you led with.
It would have been much better for us to fix some of the obvious problems with DNS back in the day. Instead, we didn't bother, and instead allowed "market forces" to dictate what happened next. This of course got buyers whatever they wanted (which was generally "short names!"), but what buyers wanted didn't necessarily map well into what would have made sense for /users/ of the system, which would have been "predictability of names."
See all the debates about area code overlays vs splits, and the extension of US telephone Directory Numbers to 12 digits.
We are now reaping the evolution of that into even further mayhem.
Yep.
I look forward to many more years of having to remember that Marty's Pizza is "martyspizza.net" instead of "martyspizza.brookfield.wi.us", that Milwaukee's Department of Public Works is at "mpw.net" instead of "dpw.ci.milwaukee.wi.us", etc.
I am, in turn, very pleased with a lot of my local municipalities. Some of them, admittedly, *have* silly pinellascounty.org or pinellas-park.com names, but they also answer to the long-form .fl.us names you would prefer. Sometimes they redirect one way, sometimes the other; sometimes each domain merely overlays the other. But at least they are, as you say, deterministic. I don't think it's fixable anymore, either. But I remain determined to spit into the wind, Jim notwithstanding. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Joseph Stalin)